"Remembrance Day" at Ukrainian Memorial Park in Etobicoke: Which Veterans Are the Canadian Forces Remembering?

- Tony Seed -

Cadets from Royal Military College, as well as representatives of the Canadian Armed Forces, participate in "Ukrainian Remembrance Day," in Etobicoke, November 11, 2015, alongside supporters of the fascist Ukrainian formations from World War II and supporters of neo-Nazi organizations that are part of the current coup regime.

On November 9 in Toronto, the Regimental Band and Bugles of the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada participated in a "Remembrance Day" event at the Ukrainian Memorial Park in Etobicoke, Toronto. The event was organized by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), Ukrainian War Veterans Association of Canada (UWVA), an affiliate of the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada, Ukrainian Canadian Veterans Fund and the Shevchenko Foundation.

Although Remembrance Day is a day during which Canadians traditionally commemorate those who fought in the anti-fascist war, which included a legion of Ukrainian Canadians, those being honoured in Etobicoke include "veterans" that were Nazi collaborators of Hitlerite Germany who voluntarily helped Nazi Germany exterminate Ukrainian Jews, Poles, Roma and tens of thousands of Ukrainians during World War II as part of ethnic cleansing of the Untermenschen.[1] The UCC deems them "freedom fighters," as they fought on the side of the Hitlerites, allegedly for independence against the Soviet Union, Canada's ally during the war. It goes so far as to demand Canada award them official "veteran's benefits." The event also venerated veterans of the Canadian and U.S.-trained Ukrainian armed forces engaged in suppressing Ukrainian citizens in the Donbass. It is part of fund-raising to send arms and supplies under the pretext they are tools of a Russian invasion.

The UWVA and the Ukrainian Bandurist Choir from Detroit, which performed at the event, were both associated with the Third Reich.

The UWVA is a political-religious organization originally formed by Wladimir Kossar in 1928 in Winnipeg to support the Ukrainian Military Organization-UVO headed by Colonel Yevhen Konovalets. The UVO was set up under the supervision of the Intelligence Department of the German War Office and under the direction of one Colonel Walther Nicolai's Section IIIB. Konovalets met with Hitler in 1922 and was beloved by Mussolini. The UVO became the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929. As events unfolded, he did everything that was ordered to be done by Berlin. Beginning in 1928 in Danzig, special schools for OUN members were opened in Germany where the students were carefully trained to carry out espionage, sabotage and assassination. During a visit in June 1929 to the United States and Canada, Konovalets encouraged his disciples to establish paramilitary associations and cells of Ukrainian veterans. Flying schools were established in the U.S. such as the “Ukrainian Aviation School” in Montgomery, New York and another by the UWVA in Ottawa, whose aircraft was named “Konovalets.” Just after returning from a recruiting and espionage trip to Canada for the Abwehr-OUN training centres in Danzig and Berlin (which included surveying the Windsor-Detroit bridge for potential sabotage, accompanied by an RCMP monitor),  Konovalets was assassinated at an OUN congress in Rotterdam in 1938 by the Nazis who thought he knew too much about the secret activity of the German government.

The OUN not only pledged its allegiance to Hitler but itself committed countless war crimes. Konovalets is still idolized by the UWVA, as evidenced by a religious meeting held on May 26, 2019 at St. Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Toronto, "to honour the memory of two great men:" Symon Petliura -- head of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) (1918-1921), who is widely known for organizing pogroms and massacres of the Jewish population of the UPR and was shot in Paris in 1926 -- and Konovalets. According to its website, "The UWVA of Canada accepted the responsibility for continued maintenance and care of Col. Konovalets' grave site in Rotterdam, and proudly continues to do so to this very day."

In Canada, the UWVA evolved into the Ukrainian National Federation (UNF) formed in 1932. Kossar, its leader, was listed as a person to be arrested and interned at the outbreak of World War II. Instead, the government of Mackenzie King intervened to create a new organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, in which all the anti-communist organizations were expected to unite as part of smashing indigenous mass communist and progressive organizations. Two of the founding factions were explicitly pro-German -- the UNF and the United Hetmen Organization -- and inculcated with the fight against "Jewish Bolshevism.”  This new organization was apparently based on a quid-pro-quo arrangement -- get behind the war effort, and in return the Canadian government would support their “cause” in post-war peace negotiations. This cause was their demand that they be installed as the leaders of an autonomous Ukraine -- similar to the one at the end of World War I -- following the hoped-for dismemberment of the Soviet Union. Kossar was amongst those summoned to Winnipeg by the government in November 1940 to participate as a founding member in the creation of the state-organized Ukrainian Canadian Committee, which was renamed Ukrainian Canadian Congress in 1989. During the war, the Mackenzie King government had to show a certain restraint, because it had begun to reluctantly cooperate with the Soviet Union in the war. Nevertheless, the two factions participated in the November 21-22, 1943 conference in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, near Zhytomyr, ostensibly on the initiative of the OUN(B) to form the so-called Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN).

For its part, under the genocidal occupation of Ukraine by Hitlerite Germany, Wikipedia records that the Kiev-based Ukrainian Bandurist Choir was given permission in 1941 to tour "areas around Kiev and parts of Western Ukraine" and in 1942 "was used by the Nazis as a morale booster, performing for the Ukrainian OST-Arbeiters (slave-workers from the East) in German work camps." After WWII, they emigrated to Detroit where they reconstituted their group.

This is the fifth year in succession in which the Trudeau Liberals have dispatched units of the Canadian Forces to lend official credibility to the Etobicoke event and the freedom fighters heroized by the reactionary organizations, beginning with a cadet unit from the Royal Military College and representatives of three branches of the Canadian Forces in 2015.

Photo from November 4, 2018 Remembrance Day ceremony at the Ukranian Memorial, posted to the facebook page of the Queen's Own Rifles.

This activity reaches far beyond the Toronto suburb. On June 18, 2018, Colonel Brian Irwin, Defence Attaché at the Canadian Embassy in Kyiv; Kareem Marcos, Deputy Canadian Ambassador to Ukraine; and Janur Peter, embassy staffer, participated in an extensive meeting with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in Mariupol to discuss military strategy and training. According to the Azov website, "At the end of the meeting, the Canadian representatives thanked Azov members for their attention and expressed their hopes for further fruitful cooperation." Also part of Colonel Irwin's meeting was "the head of the Military School of the commanders named after the colonel Yevhen Konovalets." Konovalet is one of the officer training academy's idols and his portrait frequently adorns its military iconography.

Azov Battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard, has been internationally condemned for war crimes and terrorism, most recently in an open letter by 40 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The meeting was not reported by the media in Canada until September 2019.

On August 21, 2019, flanked by three officers from the Canadian training brigade code-named Operation Unifier, Canada's then-ambassador to Ukraine Roman Waschuk took part in a grotesque ceremony in the city of Sambir in Western Ukraine, unveiling a monument dedicated to executed members of World War II Nazi ally OUN and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The monument is erected on the grounds of a broken-down Jewish cemetery, where more than 1,200 Jews were shot and dumped into mass graves in 1943 by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators. The ceremony was condemned by the Ukrainian Jewish Committee. "It's a blatant insult to the memory of the Jewish victims," Eduard Dolinsky told Radio Canada International. "It's like erecting a monument to murderers on the graves of their victims."

Postmedia reported that "Global Affairs Canada said the Sambir event was intended to assist efforts by the Jewish community in Canada and Ukraine to build public support to create an eventual memorial for the Jewish cemetery in the town. That was the reason for Waschuk's attendance and to suggest otherwise would be false, the department said." This disdain for telling the truth is tantamount to saying "the Jews made us do it." The victimizers are equated with the victims, the fascists with the Jews, who must prostrate themselves in the name of "reconciliation" and "building public support."

In November, Canada once again cynically abstained on a UN resolution condemning the revival of Nazism, the glorification of Nazi criminals, their accomplices, and those who today fuel ethnic strife and xenophobia. In approval of the resolution, 121 countries voted "Yes," 55 countries abstained, and two countries (the U.S. and Ukraine) voted "No."

The political agenda of the ruling elite in Canada has always lumped the Soviet Union and communism in with Nazi Germany and nazi-fascism with the aim of supporting nazi-fascism and opposing communism. Prior to forging the alliance with the Soviet Union after the German occupation of France and attacks on Britain, Canada declared the Soviet Union an enemy when it was forced to sign the non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939, having been isolated and abandoned by the great European powers when they signed the Munich Agreement which permitted Hitler's attacks on Czechoslovakia and Poland and their subsequent expansion to all of Europe. But Canadian soldiers did not fight in World War II to support the fascist cause: they fought to defeat it. Their participation in commemorations such as the one which is organized every year in Etobicoke undermines their integrity and the honour of all Canadians who gave their lives in the anti-fascist war. It deserves a public outcry against it.

Note

1. A term that became infamous when the Nazis used it to describe non-Aryan "inferior people," often referred to as "the masses from the East," that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs -- mainly Poles, Serbs, and later also Russians.

(Sources: Michael Sayers & Albert E. Kahn, Sabotage! The Secret War Against America, Harper & Brothers, 1942, 1st edition; New Pathway; Radio Canada International, Postmedia, Ukrainian National Federation; Wasyl Vera, The Ukrainian Canadian Committee; Its Origin and War Activity, MA thesis University of Ottawa, 1967; Saul S. Friedman, Pogromchik: The Assassination of Simon Petlura, Hart Publishing, 1976)

This article was published in

Volume 49 Number 26 - November 10, 2019

Article Link:
"Remembrance Day" at Ukrainian Memorial Park in Etobicoke: Which Veterans Are the Canadian Forces Remembering? - Tony Seed

    

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